Pillar Of America's Educational Past Gives Way To Cost Crisis

Rural Schools Face Extinction

Although Smaller Class Sizes Are A Statewide Goal, The Smallest Are Deemed Too Costly.

August 27, 2002|By Letitia Stein, Sentinel Staff Writer

KENANSVILLE -- The school bus on Route 62 makes its first stop in Yeehaw Junction about dawn. It pauses along country roads eight times to pick up 11 students, who include two pairs of siblings, three grades and two boys named Dusty.

Its trips are numbered. At the end of the year, the bus will make its final stop at Central Florida's last one-room schoolhouse -- one of two still operating in the state.

"It's not just the school. It's a member of the family," said Donna Beharry, whose son in kindergarten is the last of four siblings to attend what locals call the Kenansville schoolhouse, an annex of St. Cloud's Ross E. Jeffries Elementary.

"Small schools, I mean, that's what made the country great," Beharry added. "It was always the little two-room schoolhouse with a teacher and a few grades."

But the outlook for small schoolhouses is grim.

An hour away from the tourist corridor that made Osceola County's schools the fastest growing in the state, the yellow box of a building with a dirt circle parking lot bides its time. Enrollment at the Kenansville schoolhouse has eroded; even suburban growth has caused a school-building boom -- a situation threatening scores of small and rural schools.

Like the Kenansville schoolhouse, about half of the schools in the state's rural counties -- mostly clustered around the Panhandle -- saw their enrollment shrink in the past five years, according to an analysis of statewide enrollment figures from the state Department of Education.

Even fast-growing regions such as Central Florida that can't seem to build schools fast enough are not immune to the crisis in the rural classroom.

State enrollment figures show that Wheatley Elementary in South Apopka and Seville Public in northwest Volusia County are among a handful of Florida schools on the rural outskirts of major cities that have struggled to keep seats filled.

No one knows how many now face extinction.

State officials do not monitor rural schools -- even though one in nine Florida students attended schools in small towns and rural areas in 1999, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

The number of rural schools is changing as schools grow statewide. Some are too far from the cities' expanding circles to absorb the thousands of students arriving annually. Others are being swallowed by development, like the trim rows of subdivisions creeping onto the cattle ranches around Kenansville.

Outside Gainesville, Principal Leon Henderson of the Archer Community School is fighting back. To combat its falling enrollment, about 380 this year, he has petitioned Archer officials for new zoning laws to attract suburbanites to the area.

"A lot of rural schools could close as they get absorbed by newer, more urban schools that are growing out of the city core," he said. "We're all being absorbed by suburban life."

A TEACHER'S DREAM CLASS

Rural schools such as Archer are scattered across the state. One holds classes for students from pre-kindergarten through the 12th grade in the middle of the Everglades. South of Tampa, the town of Duette has the other one-room schoolhouse.

Like Duette, the Kenansville schoolhouse actually has several rooms -- a cafeteria and three portables. But Kenansville's 11 students need only one teacher and one classroom.

The 1917 schoolhouse was closed for about 40 years before Osceola schools reopened it as a satellite of Jeffries Elementary in 1992 to spare rural students a commute to St. Cloud that could take up to four hours each day.

The yellow-brick schoolhouse has fallen upon hard times in recent years. Third grade was moved to town to prepare for the state's accountability tests. Teachers revolved through the isolated post, and students left with them.

Still, the intimate setting is teacher Amy Flowers' dream class. She knows every parent by name and has taught many of her students' siblings.

"I think you can build a rapport with parents in town but not as much as here because of the numbers," Flowers said. "If they close, you're losing a nice experience for these kids to feel nice and safe and local."

Without the students to break even, though, the experience costs the Osceola County School District tens of thousands of dollars each year. District officials thought it could not justify the expense as thousands of new students pack into the suburban county's schools.

So they voted this summer to close the schoolhouse at the end of the year.

"There's more than a small irony in the fact that there's a quest to make schools smaller in urban areas and that takes money," said Marty Strange, policy director of the Rural School and Community Trust in Washington, D.C. "In order to find that money, some states are closing rural schools."

UNLIKELY ALLY

The stress of suburban growth has given rural schools an unlikely partner in their fight for survival -- the small city school.